John McFall is the first physically disabled astronaut . “Paralympian and surgeon John McFall is redefining the astronaut image and proving that space travel is achievable for people with physical disabilities.” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org → John McFall is the first physically disabled astronaut . “Paralympian and surgeon John McFall is redefining the astronaut image and proving that space travel is achievable for people with physical disabili...

There is a young humpback whale in the harbor at Pillar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay, California right now. Their name is Teresa T and they were first spotted on Thursday afternoon. I caught this video of the whale at at 8:30am Friday morning. Earlier today (Saturday afternoon) I went back for some photos. I caught Teresa hanging out with this pelican: And being watched by this harbor seal: Teresa is still cruising around the harbor now, on Saturday evening. We're all...

It's been a while since I've just gone all "AMA" on a weekly update, but this was just one of those weeks that flew by with my head mostly in the code and not doing much else. There's a bit of discussion about that this week, but it's mostly around the ongoing pain of resellers and all the various issues supporting them then creates as a result. I think we just need to get on with writing the code to automate everything they do so I just don't need to think about them any more 😭 Refer...

Should your garbage collector be precise or conservative? The prevailing wisdom is that precise is always better. Conservative GC can retain more objects than strictly necessary, making GC slow: GC has to more frequently, and it has to trace a larger heap on each collection. However the calculus is not as straightforward as most people think, and indeed there are some reasons to expect that conservative root-finding can result in faster systems. (I have made / relayed some of these arguments b...

uv has changed the landscape A lot has been written [ 1 , 2 , 3 ] about uv’s new features allowing it to not just work within Python but to manage Python itself . Many people have written me over email or social media to tell me that this will have a big impact. As a result, I just had Charlie Marsh (creator and lead over at Astral) on Talk Python to dive into the changes and implications. And all of these conversations got me thinking: I should really rework my infrastructure w...

The latest effort to save VIPER Illustration of the VIPER rover exploring the Moon’s south pole.  Image: NASA Members of the US Congress are stepping up efforts in the ongoing scramble to save the VIPER rover mission , which was envisioned to uniquely study lunar water deposits. Specifically, representatives in the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology wrote an open letter to the NASA chief on September 6 questioning the agency’s intent to cancel the mission by remark...

I have been meaning, for some time, to write about common carrier switching arrangements (CCSAs). These could be considered an early form of products like "virtual private ethernet:" a private telephone network that was served by the same switching machines that handled the public telephone system. A CCSA is, in effect, a "virtual telephone network." AT&T operated a number of these for both government agencies and large private organizations, and they might be viewed in a way as precursors to th...

I was recently speaking to someone in work that I mentor, and she asked me what my measure of success is. This is what I told her... So we're chatting over a coffee and talking about all manner of things (which I often do in my 1:1's with people - they're not just about work, folks!) Anyway, we got onto the topic of what we deem as being successful. Her bar for success is extremely high - she jokes that feedback to her should be short and sweet - a simple number out of 10 on how she's doin...

Hello, We are a bit busy this week hosting a small LAN party with some fans and community members to playtest the Space Age expansion, so this FFF might be a little bit shorter than normal. Combat balancing As with every major update, there are a few tweaks and balancing changes we have made. With new enemies and changes to existing enemies, we took some time to look at the current balancing. Spawner health increasing with evolution factor In the early game spawners are ...

Decentralized data management requires automation to scale governance effectively. Fitness functions are a powerful automated governance technique my colleagues have applied to data products within the context of a Data Mesh. Since data products serve as the foundational building blocks of a data strategy, ensuring robust governance around them significantly increases the chances of success. Kiran Prakash explains how to do this , starting with simple...

👋 You are reading Maker Stations — your Sunday newsletter, where we feature desk tours with makers and creators. Name: Arek Kajda Location: Kassel, Germany Occupation: Independent 3D Illustrator/Designer Room size: 16 m² (172 ft²) Cost of setup: ~$5,5K Social media: Instagram , X Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself My name is Arek, and I’m a Germany-based illustrator and visual designer. I create happy 3D visuals for brands and digital products. As an independent designer, I m...

Sometimes I just want to put pixels on a screen. I don’t want to think about SDL this or OpenGL that—I just want to draw my pixel buffer and be done. fenster , a tiny 2D canvas library by Serge Zaitsev, does just that. It’s a tiny drop-in header-only C/C++ file that weighs no more than 400 LOC of pretty readable code. It works with WinAPI, Cocoa, and X11. And it handles keyboard and mouse input, too! Sometimes I want to do just a little more than draw pixels—maybe have a menu, some...

The Euler formula states that for any real x : \[e^{ix}=cos(x)+i sin(x)\] Where i is the imaginary unit. This formula is extremely important in many branches of mathematics and engineering, but at first glance it's puzzling. What does a complex exponent even mean, and how can it be related to the trigonometric functions? Complex number representations Complex numbers have two canonical representations: Cartesian: x+iy Polar: r\angle \theta Trigonometric formulae can be...

Recently I've become a "top voice" in Cloud Computing collaborative articles on LinkedIn. If you haven't seen them before, they are (presumably AI-generated) content chunks that allow for people to contribute insight. Presumably, the results give someone information, but I've started to taking them in an incredibly real chaos gremlin way. You're just given a text box with 750 characters of room and told to go ham. Many of the responses read like they came out of a LinkedIn branded tube...

An examination of validation vulnerabilities in the Mercury Layer client libraries. An examination of validation vulnerabilities in the Mercury Layer client libraries.